How To Market A Clothing Line

Marketing a clothing line or fashion brand online can be challenging if you do not have the right tools. In this post I will present two of the best ways I show my clients how to market their clothing lines online and offline. Primarily, you have to choose between a mix of growing your online sales organically and paying to reach your potential customers. Let me explain what I mean! You can market your clothing line by using the following methods:

Introduction

The field of marketing has grown in prominence over the last decade and it has allowed ordinary individuals with no marketing background to reach their target audience without spending too much money, simply by coming up with some clever and creative marketing tactics. In my previous post on how to write a business plan for a clothing brand, I emphasized how important it is to define your target audience. When you know who will be buying your products, it will set the tone for the types of campaign you run, the language you use and the platforms you choose. If your audience is younger for example, you might choose Snapchat or Instagram to market your products. If your products are for seniors, you might choose websites with a large elder readership.

Organic vs Paid Marketing Reach

It is sometimes difficult to differentiate between organic and paid reach but basically, when you grow your audience organically, it involves word of mouth and referrals and search engine optimization. Paid marketing options include advertising on social media, Google (through Pay-Per-Click advertising) and display advertising. You should always aim to reach your audience organically because that means you don’t spend much money on advertising.

SEO is the most talked about method of marketing a brand. It is cost-effective and the financial return is amazing! It can be time-consuming but if done in a smart way you will reap great rewards. The first thing to do after you get a website (you can get a free trial of Shopify here) for your clothing line is to register on Google Search Console – its free! Google Search Console, known previously as Google Webmaster Tools is a free initiative by Google to help you get found on the web. When you sign up, simply submit a sitemap and Google will begin ‘crawling’ your pages. it is important to stick to the SEO guidelines if you want to rank high on Google! The same applies to Bing, however you will need to register on Bing Webmaster Tools.

As mentioned before you need to define who your target audience is because this will help you choose the best platform for advertising. If you choose to advertise on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, the process is quite similar. You choose a campaign, set a daily budget and target your audience based on interests or demographics. It is important to make sure that you are targeting people to get the best value for money. You should also setup goal tracking on your website to measure how effective your social media campaigns are.

If you choose to to use Instagram clothing ads for example, make sure your visuals are extremely eye-catching, this will help you stand out from the crowd. It is also worth reaching out to a few accounts who have thousands of followers to ask if they will promote your line for you. It always helps!

Pay-Per Click Advertising Using Google Adwords

Another great way of supercharging your marketing is by using Google Adwords. You bid on specific search terms like ‘blue jeans’ or ‘luxury t-shirt’ in order to show up at the top of Google searches for those terms. If you want to know how many people search for certain keywords, you can use a free Google Chrome or Firefox extension called Keywords Everywhere. It will show you the monthly search volume for any search term – see example below.

In the example above you can see that the term ‘luxury t-shirt’ gets 880 searches a month. Please note I have set my location to UK so yours might differ. You can also see a suggested bid for each term so they suggest you bid $1.19 to reach the top like Hermes. (Actual figures may vary). The competition for this is also quite high – 1 is the highest. You should be aiming to bid on search terms with 0.3 – 0.8 competition.

Word Of Mouth

Another great way of generating sales for your clothing line is through word of mouth, referrals or affiliate sales. Telling friends and family, contacting influencers on social media and agreeing a sale percentage if they promote your clothing will help you increase the visibility of your clothing brand and increase sales.

How To Market A Clothing Line

Marketing your clothing line involves a mix of organic and paid marketing activities. It is important to define your target audience and then to choose the most suitable platform to reach them. You should also spend time perfecting your tone, visuals and language. You should use social media to grow your audience and reach out to influencers in order to promote your brand.